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Comment by distant_hat | Hacker News Reader

I did that a year back though I do miss a few things. One major one is task manager. Being able to identify rogue tabs is useful. Also, in general Firefox uses a lot more resources compared to Chrome. Another is the ability to smoothly zoom in/out of pages. But overall, the privacy benefits are easily worth it.

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One Tab is useful to collect all your tabs in a list instead of leaving them open.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

Also, like someone else mentioned, you can visit this in the address bar:

    about:performance

Niether worked on Firefox for Android.

One Tab acted maliciously: If you open One Tab, it doesn't show any tabs, so as someone who never used it before, I clicked "bring all tabs to One Tab" think you had to click a button to activate it. Nope, it closed all the tabs instead with absolutely no warning or way to undo it.

That's an extremely bad design.

"Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once."

Not sure what you were expecting. And on the OneTab page that gets generated, there's a link that says "Restore All" right at the top.

That's not applicable to Firefox for Android.

Ah, noted, sorry.

OneTab has been fantastic for killing and restarting Firefox to flush the memory usage without having to reopen the entire session all over again or taking the time to pore through open tabs to pick which to close.

I know about:performance but it isn't as easy to parse as Chrome's Task Manager.

Have you tried it recently? It used to be very hectic, but it isn't anymore (I'm using Beta, not sure if it landed in Stable). It's pretty much identical to Chrome's now.

You can also start it from Menu -> More -> Task Manager. The only thing I'm missing is a handy keyboard shortcut (Shift + Esc works in Chrome/ium).

A task manager was recently added to Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-ex...

I don’t have data to back this up, more just a hunch, but I feel like Firefox uses less resources than Chrome. Less hard drive thrashing and deals with lots of tabs really well.

Yep, this hasn't been my experience at all (quite the opposite). I've been reading this FUD for as long as Chrome has been around (10 years?), and when you ask the person for concrete numbers, all you get back is "I don't know, it just feels like it". I stopped engaging at this point.

Edit: not to mention that you can configure the number of webrender processes Firefox uses to render web pages. If you have a fast enough processor, just set it to one or two and call it a day.

Chrome uses a more complicated algorithm based on the source domain and the tab "dependency" tree. You have pretty much zero control over this.

When I first used Chrome in the beta, it surpassed every browser in performance, from launch time to new tab performance etc. I don’t feel that’s the case anymore. Chrome is a lot more bloated and Firefox has made a lot of strides.

I don’t heavily use tabs like 50+ but people who do say Firefox uses less RAM.

Either way it’s fast enough now for me not to have any performance complaints.

They admitted it themselves, put out blog posts about it.

They've been putting out blog posts over the last 2 years specifically talking about the performance fixes they've put in.

Firefox themselves have admitted it's not FUD. They acknowledged it was a real problem.

It is pretty fast now, but a few years ago (at most 4), it was bloody awful.

I use both because my company is a Google shop and Google sites do work better on Chrome. e.g., for quite a while videos in Google Drive wouldn't play on Firefox. When having a similar number of open tabs and similar sites Firefox is always about 3-5x the CPU usage for Chrome.

> all you get back is "I don't know, it just feels like it". I stopped engaging at this point.

Good job you don't work in user experience design, then, because how things feel to people is a huge part of that. If software feels bad to use, people won't use it, simple as that.

No amount of haughtiness from your high horse will change that.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/performance-matters/ was a good article that I'm sure came up in HN about two weeks ago that covers this very point. It pays not to be dismissive about peoples' feelings when it comes to software, particularly around speed; they do matter.

>task manager

about:performance

It's even easier now:

Hamburger->More->Task Manager

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